The Gown In The Loft Box

The box says XMAS/MISC on the side in marker pen, which is a lie, and has been a lie for about nineteen years.

Inside it there is a gown.

It is white and it is far too long for a baby, which is apparently the point, and there is a small brown mark on the hem the shape of Portugal that nobody has ever been able to explain. It is wrapped in tissue paper that has gone the color of weak tea. She has taken it out perhaps five times in her adult life and she always folds it back the same way, along the creases that are already there, because it seems wrong to put new ones in.

And there are four photographs.

Four. Taken on a camera with a flash that has washed out everybody's forehead. In the first one, a man in a gray suit is holding her, and she does not know who he is. In the second one there are seven adults in a row outside a building with a noticeboard she cannot read, and she can identify two of them. In the third, somebody's hand is in the frame by mistake. In the fourth, her mother is laughing at something off to the left, twenty-six years old, in a coat she has never seen in any other picture.

She was eleven weeks old.

That is the whole of the archive. A gown, four photographs, and the fact that it happened, which she knows because it has always been one of those things that is simply known in a family, the way you know which grandparent was the one who could not swim.

Her mother is alive. That is not the problem. Her mother has told her about it twice, both times in passing, both times with the vagueness of somebody describing a day that was mostly about logistics and a buffet.

And she is thirty-eight now, and she has been a Christian since she was twenty-four, properly, in a way that turned her life over, and every so often somebody at church says something about their own and she smiles and nods and says nothing at all, because what would she say. That she has a gown. That there is a man in a gray suit.

She does not know what she thinks about it. That is the honest position, and she has never once said it out loud, and it is not that she thinks it did not count. It is that she does not know what she is entitled to think, and the not knowing has a weight, and she carries it in a box marked XMAS/MISC.

I am not going to give you a verdict

Let me be completely straight with you at the top, because you deserve that more than you deserve a clever page.

I am not going to tell you whether it counted.

Not one way and not the other. I am not going to build a case that it did and hand it to you with a bow on, and I am not going to hint that it did not and leave you to draw the obvious conclusion, which is the more cowardly of the two moves and much more common. Both of those would be me handing you a verdict about a morning I was not at, in a building neither of us can name, from a photograph with somebody's thumb in it.

That is not what this page is for and it is not what you actually need.

What you need is to stop standing in a doorway. Because for fourteen years you have been living with a question about your own foundation, and a person cannot build on a question. They can only hover over it.

So let me put something under you that is not a verdict, and is not mine, and does not require you to settle anything about a day in a building with an unreadable noticeboard.

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19

Look at what that verse is doing, because it was written into a mess. Paul has just been describing a situation where people were unsettled and things were being overthrown, and into that he says: nevertheless. The foundation is not the thing under discussion. The foundation stands sure while everything above it is being argued about.

And look at what the seal on that foundation actually is. It is not a certificate. It is not a memory. It is not a photograph in which somebody's forehead is washed out. The seal is the Lord knoweth them that are his, and the knowing is entirely on His side of the transaction.

You are known by the Lord. Today, at thirty-eight, in a house with a box in the loft. You have been known by Him for longer than you can account for, and that is not my reading of your situation, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in your chest rather than being received as information.

Now let me say something about the not knowing what you think, because I suspect you have been slightly ashamed of it.

You have imagined that a proper Christian would have a settled view. That somebody with a real faith would have worked it out by now, one way or the other, and that your fourteen years of smiling and nodding is a sort of cowardice.

It is not cowardice. It is a woman declining to manufacture a certainty she does not have, which is a form of honesty, and God is not impatient with it.

You are not required to have a position on your own infancy in order to be His. Scripture puts the seal on the Lord's knowing, and the Spirit of God who turned your life over at twenty-four is the guarantee of it, and neither of those has ever depended on your having reached a conclusion about a buffet.

I want to say one more thing, about the gown.

You have kept a thing you cannot interpret, carefully, along its own creases, for nineteen years. I do not think that is confusion. I think that is reverence for something you were part of before you could consent to it, and there is a great deal of grace in that instinct.

Keep it. Keep the four photographs and the man in the gray suit and the mark shaped like Portugal. Nothing on this page asks you to resolve them, and the word of God does not ask you to either, and the Spirit inside you is not waiting on it.

You are known by the Lord, and the knowing is entirely on His side of it. Scripture says the seal on the foundation is that the Lord knows His own, and the Holy Spirit who turned your life over at twenty-four is why that lands rather than merely reads.